A remorseless perpetrator of genocide

While for most, Pol Pot is the name synonymous with the deaths of around two million Cambodians in the 1970s, Nuon Chea was just as important a cog in the Khmer Rouge's genocidal machine.

Defiant until the end, the regime's Brother Number Two refused to ever accept responsibility or show genuine remorse for the crimes committed on his watch.

"If we did not kill the internal traitors in our party, if we did not smash the enemy, there would be no Cambodia today," he once told a journalist.

Indicative of the paranoid nature of the regime, Nuon Chea blamed the majority of the killings on rebellious factions within the ranks of the Khmer Rouge who defied orders, although little credible evidence of this has ever been presented.

Nuon Chea saw himself as a patriot and a man of conviction. But history will remember him as a ruthless leader who oversaw the deaths of around a quarter of his own people in some of the worst crimes of the 20th Century.